everyday adventures in an ordinary classroom

Kiva Projects – the results

I wrote last week about finishing up a unit on privilege with my 4/AP split. Part of that unit looked at microfinance and the website Kiva, which offers microloans to entrepreneurs in developing countries. My students each selected a person on Kiva that they wanted to represent in a short video, and I am offering the top 3 a small monetary prize. I’ve narrowed it down to 11 videos currently, which you can view at the links below.

In general I was happy with their work but one thing I will definitely add to this project’s rubric and all future video/audio projects is a section regarding the quality of the audio recording. I was a little let down by how many students had videos that were incredibly creative or in which the language was really great, but they had a TON of background noise in the video (why insist on recording in front of the bathroom with a continuously flushing toilet?? I’ll never know!) or they spoke in a terribly monotonous voice. Definitely a bummer, but generally speaking the product was good.

Below you’ll find links to the videos that we narrowed down to our “top 11”. Please take a moment to “like” a video or two that you think is really well done! Bear in mind that these are intermediates and they did ALL of this work themselves, so their language is at times messy and inaccurate but they are very brave in wanting their work put out there on the internet. It’s also nerve-wracking for me as a teacher to put my students’ work (and yes, errors!) out there for the world to see! 🙂 Enjoy!